The Gift of Fire (4 page)

But until I was strong enough to donate my own skin, the surgeons had to use donor skin from a “skin bank.” Donor skin was frequently used even after I was strong enough to donate my own, since once the small patches of transplantable skin I had were removed for grafting, it took several weeks for them to regrow enough to harvest again. This meant I was always in danger of organ rejection, which put my already-weakened immune system under constant attack. My exposed wounds and new skin were also an open invitation to bacteria, and I’d be plagued by more staphylococcal infections than I could count.

If the director of a horror movie ever asked me for advice on how to terrify an audience, my answer would be: “Film a kid getting prepped for a skin graft.” The seemingly endless cycle of grafts I endured began within a few days of my arrival in Boston. The doctors decided I would have two of them a week and, as young as I was, I knew exactly when those treatments were about to begin. A team of doctors and nurses, or sometimes just the nurses, would arrive at my bed with a particularly sympathetic look in their eyes that silently said, “Sorry, Danny … this is going to hurt us more than it’s going to hurt you.” That’s when the process known as debridement would begin.

Debridement simply means the removal of dead tissue—and after my accident, I was covered in dead skin that had to be removed before the new skin could be grafted on. There were several methods of debridement, and I found each one to be more horrible than the last, especially since for some reason I was never allowed to have painkillers or sedatives for any of the procedures.

Sometimes the nurses would forcibly hold down my wildly squirming body while forceps were used to grab and peel away large flakes of dead skin embedded in my raw flesh, or while a doctor used a scalpel to cut away decaying tissue. But the “tub method” was definitely the most terrifying: I’d be lowered into a stainlesssteel whirlpool and held fast by several nurses while one of their colleagues used a wire brush that looked like an enormous Brillo Pad to sweep away whatever dead bits of skin still stubbornly clung to my battered little body.

I remember the contrast between the nurses’ vicelike grips and their soothing voices as I thrashed about in vain, fighting desperately to escape their clutches and avoid the torturous treatment. All the while, they’d promise me it would be over soon, until they’d finally say in singsong unison, “There now, Danny, it’s all done … all done.” Those two words became a kind of hospital mantra for me. Whenever I spied a group of nurses approaching my bed with that sympathetic look in their eyes, I’d throw my bandaged arms up in protest and repeatedly declare in my most insistent voice that we were “All done! All done!”

My father told me that he still feels sick to his stomach whenever he recalls the times he was asked to help hold me during a debridement session. “It nearly killed me to watch you go through that,” he says today. “Your screams must have echoed across the entire hospital. Half of Boston heard your suffering.”

Yet as agonizing as the whole process was, it’s the
anticipation
of the pain I remember, not the pain itself. In fact, I can’t recall being in pain before, during, or after my stay in the hospital. With the exception of my first few days in the ICU, I wasn’t put on a morphine drip and was rarely given opiates.

Even when I was older and hooked up to self-administering morphine drips after surgery, I never once pushed the button to give myself a shot—there was no need. I guess the logical explanation is that the pain receptors in my nerve endings were destroyed when the fire burned away most of my skin. But I don’t think that’s it because I still don’t feel pain, even in places where I wasn’t burned. When I pulled my arm out of my shoulder socket not too long ago, all I experienced was some mild discomfort. Even when I had my wisdom teeth taken out, I stunned the dentist by telling him to just give me a mild anesthetic and start drilling.

In my mind, the reason I didn’t feel physical pain as a kid and don’t feel it now is that there was something greater at work. Honestly, I believe that my parents’ many bedside prayers asking for my pain to end did the trick. To this day, I think that the thoughts and wishes we put out into the universe—be they positive or negative— come back to us and manifest themselves in our lives. That’s why I always try to send out the most positive energy in my thoughts and deeds. I’ve seen the power of what many call “positive thinking,” and I both believe in it and respect it immensely.

The power of the loving energy my parents surrounded me with in Boston made all the difference in my recovery. For the first two weeks after the accident, they both spent every day in the hospital with me. But the world didn’t stop because I’d been hurt, so Dad had to fly back to Louisiana to look after my brothers and take care of his fledgling insurance company.

My father would come back to see me for weekend visits, but my mother stayed by my side. With the exception of a short trip or two back home, she was with me in Boston for the entire four months. Luckily, Mom and Dad made some friends who lived just outside of town, and they let Mom stay at their house and even lent her a car to make it easier to travel to and from the hospital.

A
FTER MY MIRACULOUS FEAT OF SURVIVING
the first 72 hours after the accident, I showed little signs of improvement for the next six weeks. Each day my mother would sit at my bedside from early morning until visiting hours were over. She’d stare at my listless body, lying as still as death inside the plastic tent, but she’d keep talking to me as though I could hear every word she uttered.

Mom would tell me over and over that she loved me; fill me in on the news from home, including what my big brothers were doing at school; and encourage me to keep fighting because the sooner I got better, the sooner I could be outside playing with the other kids again. She would stroke my face over my bandages, sing lullabies, and read my favorite children’s stories to me. Although I don’t recall much of her bedside vigil, I credit it with keeping me going all those weeks.

Nevertheless, for the better part of two months it seemed to both my family and the hospital staff that even if I beat the odds and stayed alive, I might never again be the irrepressibly energetic and mischievous little boy I’d been before. But after my father brought me a special treat one weekend, my spirits and my prospects for a full recovery suddenly soared. I’m not saying that Rocky Balboa saved my life, but he definitely made me want to get out of bed and fight to get better.

For as long as I can remember,
Rocky II,
starring Sylvester Stallone as the wannabe comeback champ, has been my favorite movie. My brothers loved it, too, and played it over and over again on the VCR. I’m sure I’d seen the movie a dozen times before I began speaking, and I was throwing jabs and uppercuts before I took my first step. For some reason, it resonated with me in every way: the simple story of the underdog never giving up on a dream; the unrelenting urge to be the best you can be despite all odds; the craggy trainer, Mickey, who never cut Rocky any slack; the goose-bump-raising scene where a couple hundred schoolchildren join Rocky as he runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and most of all, the rousing musical score by Bill Conti that still makes me want to climb into the ring whenever I hear it.

Knowing my passion for this movie, Dad brought an audio recording of it with him during one of his visits. I don’t know what he expected, but as soon as he turned on the cassette player and I heard the theme song crackling out of the tiny speaker, my entire near-comatose body started to shake and twitch. Within minutes, my bandaged foot was tapping the air along with the beat of the music—and I was struggling to sit up in bed, crawl out of my tent, and start running across the floor of the burn ward.

My parents were overjoyed by my reaction to the tape. They began to see that behind the plastic and beneath the bandages, the high-spirited little Danny they loved was alive and kicking. They’d just witnessed me taking my first tentative steps on the very long road of recovery. I think they realized that, like the character of Rocky whom I admired so much, I wasn’t going to let anyone throw in the towel or stop me from going the entire 15 rounds.

Two weeks later, Dad returned to Boston with a pair of children’s boxing gloves packed in his luggage. During those two weeks, I’d rejected some of my newly grafted skin and developed a staph infection with an accompanying fever. By the time my father arrived on the ward with my new boxing gloves, however, I’d improved enough so that the surgeon let him carefully slip the gloves over my bandaged wrists. As soon as Dad laced them up, I began taking friendly jabs at the doctors and nurses.

About two months after that first “boxing match” with the hospital staff in Boston, I was well enough to go home to Louisiana.

I
T WAS MID
-J
ULY, FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE ACCIDENT
. While I was now technically an outpatient, I still flew back to Shriners every two or three months for reconstructive surgery on my face, head, feet, hands, and just about any other body part you can name. So much of my childhood was spent in that hospital that I feel I never really left.

But as I mentioned earlier, I learned many life lessons in Boston. The first was that if you’re going to pick a role model to fashion yourself after, you could do a lot worse than Rocky Balboa. Even though a lot of people roll their eyes at me when I say how much I identify with that character, I wouldn’t be anywhere in life if I hadn’t started emulating the underdog’s never-say-die fighting spirit when I wasn’t yet three years old, trapped beneath a plastic tent, wrapped head to toe in bandages. Rocky helped make me a fighter—and if I hadn’t learned to fight, I’d be dead.

I had to fight to get through the dozens upon dozens of reconstructive surgeries I was to endure. For most people, a change in season means a change in the weather; for me it meant another 1,300-mile trip to have a part of my body rebuilt.

As you might imagine, the main reason I had so many operations was because my injuries were so severe. But you might not realize that another reason was that I was so young and still growing, which meant that the doctors had to redo their work as my bones got longer. Let me tell you, what they did was really amazing, cutting-edge stuff. Just for starters, they rebuilt my nose using part of my ribs, built my cheeks using a new type of synthetic material, used skin from the back of my head to design new eyelids, and created a thumb on my left hand where none existed.

Secretly, I suspect that those surgeons thought of me as their personal version of Steve Austin, the “bionic man” from the TV show
The Six Million Dollar Man.
I’m not sure if you remember it, but Colonel Steve Austin (portrayed by Lee Majors) was an astronaut who was horribly injured when his experimental aircraft crashed during a test flight. When he was pulled from the fiery wreckage, it was discovered that he’d lost both legs and an arm, and was blind in one eye. Like me, Austin landed in a hospital where miracles happen. When things looked bleakest for him, a scientist uttered these famous fictional words to the colonel’s medical team: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him … better than he was before.”

I’d like to think the doctors made
me
better than I was before. I’m certain they made me stronger and faster than I would’ve been without their creative genius. In fact, I became one of the fastest kids in the neighborhood after one particular surgery, which moved a tendon on my twisted left foot in an effort to pull the bone to the right. Within a couple of days of that operation, I was running wild. I had a huge boot on my leg (the kind you see on people who have had skiing accidents), and I used the momentum of the boot to propel me forward. I ran like I had wings on my feet—like little Forrest Gump and his braced legs. When the boot came off, I could run even faster … and once I started running, I never wanted to stop.

Having all that energy made returning to the confines of the burn ward all the more restrictive during my stays there. As I grew older and stronger, I regularly struck out to explore the greater universe of the hospital. I quickly discovered where the gurneys were stored and began organizing races with other young burn patients. Sometimes we’d race each other by pushing our gurneys solo; other times we’d make it more like chariot races, with one kid pushing and another riding atop the gurney’s mattress.

We liked to race along the underground corridor that connected Shriners Hospital with Massachusetts General Hospital across the street. The long tunnel had a natural dip in it, which was great for gathering speed and irresistible to fun-loving kids with a set of wheels. Unfortunately, not everyone appreciated our enthusiasm. After we accidentally clipped some doctors with a speeding gurney—and sent one of my competitors to surgery to have a dozen stitches closed up after a nasty pileup—the famous Shriners Gurney Races were shut down.

But I continued to explore the hospital. Sometimes I’d do so by myself, but I often went with a local volunteer who visited the burn ward twice a week. I knew him simply as “Shriner Bob,” and what I remember most about him is that he was superfriendly to every patient he met. Shriner Bob would lead a group of us youngsters on tours of every floor of the hospital, even those restricted to medical staff, where we on the ward were forbidden to go.

It was always an incredible adventure when Bob showed up and told us to prepare ourselves for an expedition. The group of us would trek across the entire length of the underground passageway, the former racetrack for our gurneys, to the other side into Mass General. There, Shriner Bob would take us into the gift shop to buy comic books, small toys, and sweets before returning us safely to the burn ward.

Those trips may not seem like much, but for a kid whose world was confined to the space between the metal rails of a hospital bed, crossing a tunnel and coming out through the other side was like getting in a spaceship and leaving the solar system. Bob showed me that people were capable of random acts of kindness, and that there was a great unknown universe waiting for me once I got better and could leave the hospital.